Pages

Friday, February 26, 2016

Texas! Well, Austin to be exact!

I absolutely LOVED working with the teachers in Texas at SDE's Pre-K and Kindergarten conferences! What an enthusiastic bunch of dedicated educators!

I had the opportunity to share eight sessions with some awesome educators!

My favorite session was the hands-on Make & Take called "It's A Great Day For Science!" That is something that the great Mr. Hayes, science teacher extraordinaire, would say as he greeted his 8th grade science class each day back in the 1960s & 70s in SoCal. Each time I present this session, I dedicate it to him.

I set up the night before and filled the room with samples from my classroom. Teachers were able to take photos and handle the samples.

Best of all, they got to hear three stories from some of my favorite authors:

Blue On Blue, by Dianne White is filled with rich vocabulary and beautiful illustrations. We were able to interact with the story by tapping, clapping, and slapping out the sounds of the rain. You can find out more about Dianne and her lovely book on her web site Dianne White.

Harriet Can Carry It, by Kirk Jay Mueller is a delightful story about a Kangaroo and her little Joey who just want to spend a day at the beach. I shared how to read this story while filling up a beach bag much like we do when we read The Mitten, except this story takes place in the summer. You can find more info about Kirk and his beautiful book at his web site Kirk Jay Mueller.

We all had such a GREAT time at SDE's Pre-K Conference and their Kindergarten Conference!

And in the evenings, the presenters got to enjoy some delicious Austin food and some great company! Here we are with the ladies from ESGI. That is the website that saved me hours upon hours of time and caused my students to BEG TO BE TESTED! If you haven't checked out their amazing online testing website, you owe it to yourself (and your students) to give it a try with their 60-day FREE trial. Remember to enter the promotional code KFUN when you sign up for your FREE trial and they will be happy to apply a $40 discount to your first year. CLICK HERE go grab your FREE trial and find out what all the buzz is about!

And when it was time to fly back to California, the full moon was shining over my Southwest plane.

Saturday, February 20, 2016

I Can't Wait!

Austin, here I come!

I'm so excited to be traveling to Austin for 2 conferences! The SDE Pre-K Conference AND The SDE Kindergarten Conference will both be held in Austin at the Double Tree Hotel on February 22 and 23. I am so honored to be presenting with such great icons of education! You can check out these 2 conferences by scrolling down.

Did you ever wonder what it takes to put on a "Make & Take" session? Well, I'm doing 3 of them so my dining room has turned into a "Make & Take Kit Factory" for a few days.

I made 135 of these for our "Math & Art" Make & Take.

And these are the kits for my "Re-telling Stories to Writing" session.

Make some out of light brown construction paper and some out of dark brown construction paper so you have light and dark chocolate cubes and cylinders! What a FUN way to get that academic vocabulary in use! Right?

Let your students help "build" the candy shop by creating a AB patterns out of black and white paper squares. Use these to line the shelves. If you are using a small desk as your store, just place a piece of construction paper covered with the black and white patterns on the desk. Add some doilies with brown candy cups glued on them and place the paper candy pieces in the cups.

And did you know that See's Candy stores will give you little brown candy cups? They will also give you little white bags with the See's Candy logo on them!

I added a picture of Mary Sees and a photo of the first See's Candy shop to provide a social studies link to times past.

So what do you do with the heart-shaped boxes? My students decided that the cube candies were 1 cent each and the cylinder candies were 2 cents each. Students filled the heart-shaped boxes with paper candies and the "clerk" used a calculator, a toy cash register, or paper and pencil to add up the cost of the candies.

After the "shopper" buys candies, he/she becomes the clerk and the first job is to re-stock the shelves with the candies they just bought.

Visit my TpT store to find more "shopping" activities where students create simple projects and get to "buy" the embellishments. Directions and shopping receipts can be found BY CLICKING HERE.

Opinion Writing:

Kindergarten students had to tell me which symbol was their favorite and why. This was one of the opinion pieces we wrote. They wrote the words "I like" and they copied the name of their favorite national symbol.

Then, they dictated to me why they liked that symbol, I wrote it on lined paper, and they copied it on our special flag writing template and illustrated it where the stars would normally go on the flag template. We were sure to add blue background to the illustrations and red stripes between the lines on writing so the pages look like American flags.

Opinion Discussion:

My Transitional Kindergarten kids also told me which American symbol was their favorite, they also wrote "I like" and copied the name of their favorite symbol. Then, we discussed why each student liked the symbol they chose, but we didn't write why.

Time to Display Our Work:

After we mounted each flag template to a piece of 9"X12" red, white, and blue construction paper, we put them up on our magnetic board with magnets. They look so cute! My favorite illustration is Mount Rushmore.